Anatomy of a Scandal

by Sarah Vaughan

  ‘Oh, they are adorable, Alex.’

  Her friend beams with pride, embarks on a lengthy anecdote about their precocious speech – tedious and yet the glow on Alex’s face makes it bearable – and she tries to ignore Rob’s suggestion which prods like an insistent toddler. Divorce. The endless compromises made in a marriage. A lawyer who made things easier than they might have been.

  Beside her, Rob starts a conversation with Andrea, a woman she barely recognises, who is sitting opposite. Their voices swell and rise and she sips her red wine, feeling the room grow warmer and still more intimate; leaning against Alex – now talking about her babies’ sophisticated palates – feeling the warmth of her friend’s arm against hers, recalling a friendship that might be rekindled after all these years.

  At one point, she senses that someone is looking at her. She looks up and diagonally across two tables sees a woman’s face: dark eyes; blonde hair in an ill-kempt bob; an unsmiling mouth that fails to twitch in recognition or display any warmth when she smiles back. Odd. Her smile falters as the woman turns away.

  Alex is still talking and so she slips back into listening, offering approval when required, umming and ahhing, while marvelling at the happiness her friend accepts unthinkingly. She felt like that when Emily was born and James was smitten with his first experience of fatherhood. Then again, more acutely, after Finn’s birth. Such brief, precious slivers of time.

  Her mind rambles, fretting about that woman – her head now hidden behind a thick bank of dinner jackets – and about Rob who has unleashed a perturbing train of thoughts with his intervention. Divorce. The endless compromise.

  It is only when she is sure that he is not looking that she takes the card and slips it into her purse.

  Later, much later, they spill out into the quad. It is past midnight and many of them are making for bed, a couple, she notes with amusement, with one another: a second-year romance rekindled, if only for one night.

  Rob waves a cheery farewell. ‘Sorry if I overstepped the mark,’ he begins but she cuts him short. ‘Not at all. No need to apologise.’ Her tone, polite, detached, is that same she uses with constituents who persist in ringing them at Thurlsdon, desperate for James’s attention. Rob half-raises his hand, revealing a crumpled dress shirt – it is that time of night – and disappears up a Gothic staircase in the corner of the quad.

  ‘Heading for the bar?’ Alex tucks her arm into hers and they make their way around the lawn. The night is warm; the stars as bright as she remembers them on that night when she lay in the dew and watched them spinning; and, as she looks up, she stumbles, the drink telling on her – or perhaps this bout of nostalgia; this sense of other, lost versions of her life.

  ‘You all right?’ Alex holds her steady as she puts her shoe back on, squeezing her hand.

  ‘Sorry, yes.’ The gentleness of her hand-holding, of this easily resumed friendship, stirs her to tears. They haven’t talked of James. She imagines chatting into the early hours then realises that’s impossible – because how can she risk opening up to anyone about him?

  ‘I’ll be with you in a second. I just need a couple of minutes.’

  ‘If you’re sure? What can I get you? A half cider for old time’s sake? Or a bottle of Bud, wasn’t that what you used to drink?’

  She hasn’t drunk beer for years.

  ‘Actually, please could I have a single malt with ice?’

  ‘Well – if you’re sure?’

  ‘Honestly. I promise I’ll be down in a couple of minutes. I just need to sit here for a bit to think things over.’

  Alex’s eyes soften. She is no fool; and suddenly Sophie cannot bear her pity.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Well, then. I’ll see you in a bit.’ And her old friend slips across the grass.

  For a while she just sits, on a bench tucked away in the corner of the quad, watching them drift to the bar or off to the JCR. The old cliques have reasserted themselves: the science geeks barely speaking to the arts graduates; the past snobberies still prevalent – though it is the geeks who run the world now, the historians and English graduates all teachers and journalists unless they have become management consultants or accountants on graduation, their artistic leanings boxed away.

  The bench is solid beneath her thighs; and the chill takes the edge off her giddiness as she tries to focus on those who are near her, and to imagine the eighteen-year-olds haunting their middle-aged selves. Some have barely changed; a few are unrecognisable: the bleached hair or the dreadlocks sported until they started attending job interviews now tamed into neat bobs and receding short-back-and-sides.

  As the figures ebb away, she becomes conscious of someone sitting down beside her. She glances at this intruder and feels that creep of trepidation. It is the woman who glowered at her at dinner and she still isn’t smiling but gives a long, laboured sigh.

  ‘I’m so sorry – I’m afraid I can’t remember your name.’ Sophie tries to assert control of the situation.

  ‘Ali. Ali Jessop. Alison at college. I thought it made me sound more adult.’ The woman turns to look at her directly, and Sophie sees that she is quite tipsy, her eyes bloodshot and lit with a curious, unnerving fire.

  ‘Don’t worry. You didn’t know me.’ Ali seems to read her mind. ‘I wasn’t one of the beautiful ones. I read maths: not your subject.’

  ‘Oh.’ She tries to relax but there is a layer of resentment anchoring this woman’s voice. Did she once slight her or is she one of those women who unaccountably resent those who are more attractive than themselves? Perhaps she feels out of place: bad roots in a mumsy bob; a little overweight? Her thin black tights have a ladder racing up her calf that she doesn’t seem to have noticed. Sophie would always notice. She clutches at these possibilities before considering the likelihood that this is the person with whom she will have to spar this evening: not a domineering PPE graduate jealous of her husband, but some earnest Labour supporter.

  ‘I’m so sorry I don’t remember you,’ she manages. ‘I’m hopeless with names. Did we have friends in common?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Ali draws the syllables out in a bitter, guttural laugh. ‘Do you remember Holly? Holly Berry?’

  Her scalp tightens with that sense of premonition and the image of a girl half-remembered – and thought of only recently.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. In fact I was only thinking of her a few months ago. Someone reminded me of her.’

  ‘Your old tutorial partner.’

  ‘Yes, briefly. We were quite friendly that first term and then she left, suddenly, at the end of the first year. I never knew why.’ She pauses. ‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t realised you were friends.’

  ‘Why would you? You didn’t remember me in the least.’

  ‘No, well, quite.’ She is wrong-footed and tries to steer the conversation into less belligerent waters. ‘Is she well? Are you still in touch with her?’

  ‘I’m still in touch with her, yes.’

  Ali stares at her for a moment then leans back on the bench and looks straight in front of her at a bedroom high in the middle line of the quad, below the sundial. Sophie waits, puzzled by her behaviour, and increasingly apprehensive that this somewhat drunk yet articulate woman is about to hurl an emotional grenade.

  ‘As to whether she’s well – well, she’s well enough. She’s professionally successful. Unmarried; no children.’

  ‘What does she do?’ She clutches at straws.

  Ali turns and looks at her directly. ‘She’s a barrister.’

  And there it is: that frisson of fear, so intense the air around her perceptibly chills and every sensation becomes heightened. Earnest Holly – plump; painfully right-on; almost pretty; rather sweet; somehow unworldly – is a barrister. Kate Woodcroft flashes into her mind and she dismisses the image at once. That’s not even a possibility. And yet Holly became someone as authoritative – as powerful – as her.

  ‘That was Holly’s bedroom.’ Al
i jerks her eyes up. ‘I found her there afterwards. She’d locked the door and it took twenty minutes for me to persuade her to open it. When I did, she wouldn’t let me touch her: arms wrapped tight around herself; swamped in those baggy clothes I’d finally persuaded her not to wear.’ Her voice catches, a moment of weakness, and she steadies it, still not looking at Sophie; eyes straight ahead, as if she is determined to finally have her say.

  ‘You wonder why she left? What made her give up her Oxford degree when she had fought so hard to get here? What could make a young woman do that?’ She turns and looks at her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sophie grasps for any wild, possible explanation, though her insides are falling away and she feels as if she is tumbling inside herself. She knows what is coming. ‘Did she get pregnant?’

  ‘She was raped.’

  The words are whispered: just three syllables, shots from a gun that reverberate and resonate.

  ‘Your husband has form, Sophie,’ Ali says. Her voice is low and pragmatic; saddened not malevolent. ‘I am only telling you this because I’m drunk; I had to get drunk to say it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. He raped her as an eighteen-year-old virgin at the end of our first year. I don’t imagine he’s ever considered the impact of what he’s done; perhaps he didn’t even realise: thought it was just another casual sexual encounter. But he did it all the same.’

  The ugly words swarm around her and she stands, desperate to escape. Her legs feel insubstantial but her heart is racing, blood thudding through her head.

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’ She knows she sounds preposterous but she has to say something. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re lying! What a nasty, vicious thing to say.’

  Ali looks up at her from the bench; gives a minimal shrug, just the smallest of movements. ‘I’m not – and I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You little bitch.’ The words take Sophie aback but her self-preservation is stronger than she realised. Whatever the truth, she can’t let people think this of James.

  She must get away from this woman; and she turns, head held high, kitten heels clicking fast upon the path as she stalks away. Click, click, click. Keep your posture straight; keep walking away from her; don’t run; you’re nearly there. She tries to cling to something positive. The children! She imagines Finn’s arms tight around her; then sees Emily’s face, just a little doubtful when told Daddy was in court because a lady was unkind. She twists on a heel, falters, stumbles, then half-runs as the truth comes crashing down on her; the facts neatly aligning like a Rubik’s cube clicking into place.

  At the library, she starts to slow but Ali’s voice follows her as she leaves the quad; a final taunt – low and mocking – that will hound her in the long hours of a sleepless night and continue to nag her over the coming days and weeks.

  She tries to pretend it is never said but the night is still and the quad empty.

  ‘I’m telling the truth – and I think you know it.’

  SOPHIE

  3 October 2017

  Thirty-two

  The drinks reception at the conference hotel is packed. Heaving with delegates exhausted from a long day’s lobbying, their smooth faces sheened in sweat and adrenalin and the thrill of being in the same room as so many MPs.

  The white wine is medium dry and warm. At the Spectator party, they serve Pol Roger champagne; at every other there is only this, concentrated orange juice, or fizzy water. Sophie swigs it anyway, tasting the thinness of the wine and the kick of the afterburn that strips her mouth and should, with any luck, soon numb the rest of her. She is drinking far more these days.

  Where is her husband? She scans the room, conscious that he is still her focal point and wishing that she could relax and not continually note his absence, check his presence. But then, she is only here for James. It’s ridiculous: it’s not as if she doesn’t think of leaving him. Every morning she wakes and for a split second lies there in calm ignorance: in that semi-conscious state in which she is only aware of the warmth of her bed and the crispness of her sheets, for she is fastidious about weekly or twice-weekly sheet changing. In this state, the day still – just – holds the potential for contentment, for it is contentment, rather than anything more ambitious like happiness, that she craves.

  And then, perhaps half a second later, the illusion is broken and she remembers. The memory comes as a physical pain. A corroding of her stomach and an aching of her heart so that she is briefly paralysed by the weight of her sorrow and the burden of a knowledge that could consume her if she did not swing her legs over the side of the bed and get up: up, up, up for there are children to get to school and the day to get on with and no time for introspection, which must be banished before she obsesses completely and it eats her away.

  She tries applying the CBT techniques taught by Peggy – with whom she still cannot be truthful, of course, but who has proved helpful. But most of the time distraction, in the form of exercise and the perpetual, ruthless, unnecessary reorganisation of her house, is what works best.

  In this way, she manages to box up the thoughts that kaleidoscope in those waking moments and, as she showers, before the welcome interruption of the children. Is James a habitual rapist? Was it just Olivia and Holly – for she has accepted what Ali says; a fact she finds almost unbearably sorrowful – or were there other young women beyond those two; these incidents not blips? Will there be others, still? A stream of lovers whose wishes he casually overrides because his need is more important? Just the thought stymies her, here in the bathroom; makes her want to stay, hidden, under the running water forever.

  Does he ever think about what he has done? They never discuss it, of course, and he was so steadfast in his opinion – ‘I told the truth, near enough. Or the truth as I saw it. She wanted sex several times in similar situations’ – that she knows his view won’t have changed. But if he still has such a flexible approach to consent and to telling the truth, then what does that say about her? The fact she is still married to him.

  When these thoughts press in, she cleans neurotically: drenching the corners of the cupboards with antibacterial spray; culling the children’s rooms of toys they have long outgrown but which they will mourn when they notice; folding underwear according to the strictures of a lifestyle guru, any odd socks or imperfect garments recycled, for her house will be rigorously ordered if nothing else is.

  And, eventually, the churning turmoil of her mind begins to fade. Being away from London helps: away from James, with Ginny in Devon; and, incredibly, at the end of August, on a family holiday in France with him. He is charming with the children and loving to her. And though she feels nothing when he touches her, she knows that she needs to appear to thaw for the sake of Emily and Finn. They are – must be – her priority.

  It becomes increasingly bearable to put on an act: to talk about new starts, and things getting better, because this is what a large part of her – the part that tries to forget what Ali told her and what James has admitted – so desperately wants to believe. And yet, on the rare occasions when they make love, she imagines organising her kitchen cupboards, the Kilner jars replaced for Jamie Oliver ones perhaps; with the Hardwick Green-type lids. Just as she knows – from knowing James – that it becomes second nature to detach oneself when having an affair, so she annexes her real self. She goes through the motions with her husband, while the real Sophie, the Sophie who was Sophie Greenaway perhaps, the girl who could scull down a river, confident, complete without a charismatic man to cling to, exists elsewhere.

  And so she manages, she just about manages. Taking each day at a time; thinking purely of the children; looking on any possible bright side – she lives by these mottos, slipping a smile on her face when required. Look at her, here. In this thickly carpeted conference hotel: the one blasted apart by an IRA bomber in the mid-80s. Five people were killed then. She is so conscious of this fact, and it grounds her. However vast her problems, they are nothing compared to the finality of death.

>   She takes another glass from a waiter and drinks to that thought, aware her face is a mask of contemplation at odds with the frivolity of those around her. ‘Cheer up. It might never happen!’ A red-faced chap, pink shirt tugging at the waist revealing a sausage-like roll of fat, puts a hand in the small of her back as he sidles past and she recoils from his moist palm, her body tense. ‘No need to glower, dear!’ He holds up his hands in mock surrender; aggression palpable behind his thin veneer of affability. She smiles, her face taut, and turns away.

  But someone else catches her eye. A lean man in late middle age who is listening to Malcolm Thwaites, head cocked to one side, dark eyes flickering over his face intently. His navy suit shines – it looks a little threadbare – and dandruff brushes his shoulders; lean fingers toy with a glass of red. She recognises him from court: Jim Stephens, one of the reporters who filled the press benches, and who shouted at her that terrible morning when James arrived to give evidence. ‘Does the PM still have full confidence in your husband, Sophie?’ A question that still sparks a sting of fear. She remembers how determined he was to provoke a response and how this jarred with his shambolic manner: that shabby raincoat; his breath, as he came too close to them, sharp with coffee and cigarettes.

  Her scalp pricks. He doesn’t work in the lobby, so why is he here? He must be sniffing for dirt on James. At last year’s party conference, her husband was sleeping with his researcher. Who’s to say that James isn’t such a risk-taker, he’s back to his old ways? Or is he probing for a different story? The newspapers are still obsessed with that photo of the Libs: the one with Tom and James preening on the steps; an indelible, resonant image of their privilege. She thinks of the terrible event at the end of her first year; James’s anguish when he told her, the next day: eyes red-rimmed and uncomprehending. The only time she has ever seen him cry. Her heart judders. Please, don’t let him have a sniff of that story.